Monday, February 8, 2010

Note Book Randomness 2

On the subject of notebooks, I’m constantly on the lookout for notebooks that will make it easier for me to chart/graph/scribble my creations (insert mad scientist knittist laugh here) and make notes on the same page. Seems like Day-Timer used to have these “project” pages where the top half of each page was graph paper for sketching and the bottom half was lined for notes. Can’t find them anymore, but I’ve been on a passive quest to find a notebook with something equivalent. Generally, I end up with notebooks of graph paper. I did find a NoteSketch book by Bienfang, which is blank at the top with lines at the bottom, though I haven’t tried using it yet. I really do prefer to have the half graph/half lined pages since I’m not much of an artist and the squares make it convenient to count stitches even if they do nothing to improve my handwriting. Given the difficulty in finding such a specialized notebook, one might wonder why I continue the search. The answer is simple:

That is the plan/pattern for a baby blanket I just finished (note the lack of, well, notes).

Those are my initial notes for the hat and booties. Note the lack of sketches. Also note that they’re in two separate notebooks.

Here’s where I reverse-engineered the booties after knitting them and scribbled out the pattern:

Now we’re up to three notebooks.

Here’s the post-knitting reverse-engineered pattern for the hat, though we are still at three notebooks:

My point is, if I could find something that had graph paper and note lines on the same page, this entire baby set could have been in one book. Wouldn’t that have been both convenient and slightly less mad scientist knittist? Oh sure, the writing might still remind one of a mad scientist scribbling frantically on a chalkboard, trying to complete a brand new equation that might change the universe as we know it, but at least there would be a little sketch nearby so you could tell it was just a baby bootie pattern.

P.S. I plan to actually type these patterns up, thus the notes and reverse-engineering my own knitting.

Virginia: Thanks :-) I didn't used to reverse engineer my own knitting, but since I figure somebody somewhere might want the pattern (including, potentially, myself), I'd better put it in some form that can be read (vs. my initial scribbles). I tend to just gloss over the mistakes when writing the 'real' pattern, tho ;-)

You know, it just occured to me that I probably have the very thing you're looking for in my D&D 2E stash. There was a product by TSR for drawing dungeons that had graph on the top and a place for notes on the bottom. Remind me and I'll see if I can find it, sugar. :)